This is a book about obsession - Greer's obsessive desire (need) to find out more about her now dead father. The trouble about all books about obsessions is that, unless one shares them, at least in imagination, it is rather hard to get the point. I am afflicted with ancestors and relatives. I know the maiden names of all four of my great-grandmothers. The last thing I want is to know anything more about my progenitors.
I can stretch my mind, just, to understand how adopted children want to know who they really are, or why the children of emigrants need to find their roots; but here is Greer with a perfectly passable father, a wonderfully mad mother (who is, despite her daughter's best efforts, the real heroine of this book) and a brother and sister who seem admirably tolerant of their big sister's personal foibles, obsessively determind to rush round the world, find out The Truth, and tell the world all about it.
Why? It is the lack of an answer to this basic question that makes the whole book faintly tedious. Greer presents the 'need to know' as self-explanatory, as somehow natural or inevitable. So natural and necessary indeed that she not only searched for answers, but insisted on laying these pretty brutally on the rest of her family.
But, really, that isn't good enough. Her father returned from the war crippled socially and personally by 'anxiety neurosis' and clearly lived a difficult and lonely life. He failed to communicate with his daughter (but many fathers of highly intelligent daughters do).
The book could have been immeasurably deepened by some attempt at self-analysis. Why did Greer want to find out more? To expose him and her family to the world, ruthlessly strip away her mother's protective camouflage, refuse to forgive him for his failings?
She offers two suggestions in the text: a) she had taken a large advance and had to finish the book to pay it off and b) he didn't love her properly. Neither seem quite adequate. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; but this seems pretty energetic punishment to inflict on a dead man.
Because in Greer's estimation, her father was a stinker - a liar, a philanderer, an ingrate, a phoney. She emphasises his sins by sentimentalising his adopting mother, by presenting her own mother as a sweet little exploited thing, in marked contrast to all the anecdotes about the woman, and by reiterating the ways in which he failed her - like not giving her a new coat when she lost hers as an undergraduate.
She fails, however, to prove him a villain: more a victim of intolerable circumstances, a bloke who did the best with what he had which wasn't much, but was unable to keep it up to the end.
Like so much of Greer's more recent writing, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You is an odd mixture of enormous energy, wit and cosummate vulgarity and snobbishness. The travel writing, including an account of the Second World War siege of Malta and some trips to the Australian outback, is terrific, capturing details with precision and skill.
But against these have to be put a thousand tiny pointers to our Germaine as the only truly decent human being in a world full of ignorant, vicious, cowardly nincompoops, who don't even understand the beauties of Tuscany. Perhaps that is why she never has to explore her motives: if she wants something it must be a wonderful and noble thing to want.
What I did think as I struggled through this moderately pointless, if occaisionally amusing exercise in self-indulgence, is that if Greer could distance herself from being the heroine of her own work she could make a marvellous fiction writer; sardonic, knowledgeable and quick. What doesn't really work as non-fiction because of her unwillingness to bare her soul, instead of the souls of all about her, might make a truly moving novel. She has done a lot of things now; I'd be interested to see her try that.
